● 07.01.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 01/07/2023: “Discord, Youtube, Reddit, and Twitter Are All Attempting Self-Destruction”

Posted in News Roundup at 12:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Just now getting a chance to kick back after a busy moving week.

• We don’t have a ton of stuff (one of the advantages of student life I’ve realized) and had friends and family at both ends of our trip who were able to help load or unload, so the typical moving stuff wasn’t that bad.

• What definitely wasn’t so great was getting zero hours of sleep the night before we had planned to make the 10 hour drive to our destination. Maybe it was the air mattress, or the cold I caught, or the difficulty of switching off my brain after a long day of packing and cleaning. Most likely all of the above, but I can’t help but think that my mind not wanting to enter sleep mode was the biggest factor.

Politics and World Events

• Today, the last day of Pride Month, SCOTUS has ruled it is legal for businesses to discriminate against queer people solely because they are queer.

• I have been sitting on this for nearly two years and I’m getting tired of waffling over whether this is too mean or too _whatever_ to publish. I’m tired of playing to the feelings of cishet people when I am a daily witness to the ongoing genocide of my own people. So as yet another pride month ends, I’m finally putting this out there. Enjoy, or not. If you’re cishet and this post upsets you, I don’t want to hear it. Sit back and think about why you get upset when a transgender woman tells you you’re not doing enough.

• In case there’s any doubt which Supreme Court I’m referring to, it’s the US one. If you aren’t up on US news, allow me to briefly sum the latest bullshit up.

• In 2016, a web designer based in Colorado name lorie Smith filed a lawsuit against the state of Colorado for violating her religious freedom, as she wanted to begin doing web design work for engaged couples, but only for straight couples, which under law in Colorado would constitute discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Technology and Free Software

• **I recommend anyone to use an adblocker[1] whenever they can.** Despite them being annoying, they’re also good for your privacy.

• Rogue is, of course, the game that spawned a genre—the Roguelikes, and, more recently, Roguelites.

• I say “of course”, but to be proper long form content this post should really define its terms. I don’t want to go into great depth on what a Roguelike is because it’s been done many times, so I’ll just pull out a few key defining characteristics for you.

• Today I finished my Quality Manager course that was presented online. It was a great experience, made some friends and learned some cool things that I would hopefully be able to use in a future job when I get one, fuck knows when that will be. Anyways.

• Been super busy this month, and can’t really say exactly what I was spending my time on, the month just flew by without me really getting a grip on time. I guess the move and covid kept me busy? Hopefully I will be more productive in July, things seem to be settling.

• On my to-do list is definitely to format this Manjaro laptop and install Debian 12 via their netinstall image. Absolutely a beautiful piece of software. You install the iso, you log into your user account, install the software you need, and everything works after a reboot, just beautiful.

• In 2012, I started a website called tiltish, intending to create a platform for individuals to rate / score news articles (how they “tilt” on the political spectrum), and discuss their contents. I thought it might be an interesting way to identify media bias. It was a great opportunity to wrap my head around ajax and a lot of other web programming concepts, and it fed the interest I had at the time in general news media.

• Through the development and beta-testing cycles of that project, I very quickly came to realize something: all of the news media outlets were biased, and in the same ways. In fact, they functioned as a collective would, and not as individual outlets should.

• This was recommended in a writing Discord I’m in. One way to keep yourself from going back and editing constantly is to just *not see* what you’ve written before. Webdings, Wingdings, or really any other “obscured glyphs” font would work for this, but this one also doubles as a neat way to represent redacted text.

• When you need to regularly run a program on your workstation that isn’t powered 24/7 or even not every day, you can’t rely on cronjob for that task.

• Fortunately, there is a good old tool for this job (first release June 2000), it’s called anacron and it will track when was the last time each configured tasks have been running.

• I’ll use OpenBSD as an example for the setup, but it’s easily adaptable to any other Unix-like system.

Internet/Gemini

• There is a lot to unpack in @freezr’s recent post about 4 years of Gemini. However something that I felt compelled to write about was their suggestion to add table syntax to gemtext.

• Here’s a short-form list of things I think would help Gemini as a technological ecosystem and as a community.

• It’s a rough time for social media. Four giants are currently doing their best to anger their user-base and undermine the purpose of their platforms.

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